MUMBLZ CREATIVE
PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEOGRAPHY & CREATIVE DIRECTION BY CRISTIAN SOLIMENO
Exhibitions have changed the way I think about my work...
PEOPLE AND OTHER ANIMALS
This show was originally curated by Amanda Thompson. An extraordinary designer and couturier based here in London who I have shot for over the years. She has a boutique in Ladbroke Grove and wanted to put on an exhibition of my work in a new section of her shop. Amanda often uses animal print designs in her work and she had noticed that I approach animal subjects as if they were people. sometimes with amusing results. It’s true that I do see animals as distinct personalities just as I do humans, and I realised that I do probably approach shooting them in much the same way. The show wound up being a look at my portraits of people and of animals and at the ways we coexist. I used a portrait of Amanda as the poster art for the show. This was a more modest show but was probably a better size in general. We extended and extended the show well past the original dates and it was a wonderful experience.
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I will be remounting this show in 2026
PHOTOGRAPHS OF INVISIBLE THINGS
This was my first show. and it coincided with a book of the same name being published in 2021. I wanted to explore the fact that when I looked back at my work, I had started to notice all kinds of things that I wasn’t consciously aware I had been shooting, invisible things like courage, kindness, curiosity and compassion. I wanted to really look at this stuff and encourage my audience to look at the images in a different way. The show was huge and incredibly ambitious. More than 100 images, filling up the whole gallery with no wall space left unused. When you walked in it was like entering my memory somehow. The intention was to create an immersive experience and I think it worked.
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When I was preparing it all I kept finding that I was losing time at a rate I’d never experienced before. Bear in mind every image had to be painstakingly selected, prepared, processed, edited, printed, framed, a place had to be chosen for each of them and of course, they all had to be hung. Here’s what I eventually realised… every time I spent just 10 minutes working on each image it would take nearly seventeen hours to do one pass of all them!! But in the end, it was all well worth while. Lots of people came to see the show and my images sold well. and I realised something incredibly important, that printing your work, showing it in a physical space, and sharing it with others, massively changes the way you think about what you do.
